Dr Mae Carroll from the University of Melbourne as well as CIRHSS research affiliate will be giving a talk (Monday 15 December 2025 10:00 AM) at the Fakultas Ilmu Budaya Research Talk (FReTalk) series organised by the Faculty of Humanities, Udayana University. Abstract, the title, and the flyer for the talk are provided below.
Ngkolmpu and Typology of exponence: What can Ngkolmpu, a language from South Papua, tell us about how inflectional information expressed in the world’s languages?
Abstract
Arguably no part of language displays more salient cross-linguistic variation than that of inflectional morphology, i.e. the marking of categories such as number or plural within the structure of words. On one end, we have languages like Standard Indonesian which, despite rich derivational morphology, displays no inflectional morphology. At the other end the extreme, we have Ngkolmpu, a Yam language spoken by around 200 solely in the village of Yanggandur in the Merauke region of South Papua Province, Indonesia, in which a single transitive verb arguably inflects for over 3000 combinations of inflectional features. However, the true complexity of Ngkolmpu lies not in the size of the system but how it organised with each category being simultaneously marked by multiple bits of morphological material simultaneously. In this talk, I will lay out the various ways in which inflectional information may be encoded in language and exemplify these with examples from Ngkolmpu and then compare these to a cross-linguistic sample of languages from around the world to place Ngkolmpu within this space.
